Month: May 2017

Donald Trump is not under siege, however the people of the United States, indeed much of the world, are under siege by him. I think many sections of the left are incorrectly analysing political developments. Upon appearances Trump is under siege, but the left needs to look beyond appearances to […]

Plutonium has been in the news over the past few weeks, and some aspects are worth commenting upon. The first had to do with the collapse of a tunnel storing nuclear waste from Hanford, where the United States produced weapons grade plutonium during the cold war. Secondly, the Trump administration […]

For some bizarre reason, without any action of the will, I got to thinking about general relativity. There were two things that had me thinking. The first, historical, the other, philosophical. I will make some brief remarks regarding both. I have been looking at the relationship between big science and […]

Assessment by independent analysts of North Korea’s missile programme can be, roughly, divided into two periods. The first, when state officials exaggerated Pyongyang’s missile programmes especially in justification of ballistic missile defence, most analysts, correctly, tended to downplay North Korea’s missile capabilities given that it was based on Scud technology. […]

On May 21 North Korea tested a ballistic missile to a range of 560km and an apogee of 500km, about the same performance characteristics of a Pukguksong-2 medium range ballistic test in February. Furthermore, a press statement from the Korean Central News Agency confirmed that the missile tested was a […]

2017 marks the 60th anniversary of the onset of the space age following the launch of Sputnik by the USSR in October 1957. The United States, certainly the Eisenhower administration, welcomed Sputnik because it set an important precedent, namely free navigation in space. Washington welcomed this because it gave the […]

Like I said, don’t forget the RV when it comes to North Korea’s Hwasong-12 missile test. David Wright has a great post up on at the Union of Concerned Scientists blog on the RV angle. He finds, pretty much as I had done, that This shows that North Korea could […]

Let us engage in some educated guesswork. Hitherto giventhe multiple failures of the Musudan IRBM, and North Korea’s own announcement following the successful testing of the Pukugsong 2 MRBM that it was shifting to solid fuels for longer range missiles, we understandably tended to assume that North Korea had closed […]

North Korea, through an official KCNA press release, has unveiled the Hwasong-12 Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile which was successfully tested on May 14. John Schilling at 38North had good early analysis pinpointing that missile tested had to be the modified KN-08 that was paraded on a Musudan TEL at the […]